1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a word processing apparatus for electronic processing of rows of characters.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There is already known an apparatus for printing characters in uniform rows within a given area, as exemplified by the word processing apparatus disclosed in Japanese Patent Application 127203/1979. Such apparatus, however, simply divides the given area by the number of desired rows or said number minus one in allotting the rows of characters in said area, and determines the printing pitch of characters by the quotient of said division. For this reason the residual of the division is disregarded, and the resulting error becomes significant when the number of characters constituting a row increases.
The presence of such error in each row will result in unaligned end positions of the rows on a document.
Also there is known a word processing apparatus capable of automatically handling the characters of which use is inhibited for the head or end of a row.
In such apparatus, sentences for example entered from a keyboard are displayed on a cathode ray tube (CRT) for various processings such as editing. The inhibited character process is not conducted at this stage. In response to an instruction for printout, the sentences are printed with automatic inhibited character processing.
The inhibited character processing in such apparatus is only conducted at the printout stage and can therefore be verified only on the printing paper. Consequently the actual printout obtained may differ from the expected form.
Also already known is a word processing apparatus capable of automatically conducting inhibited character processing for the head and end of rows in Japanese sentences.
In such apparatus, sentences entered for example from a keyboard are displayed on a cathode ray tube for various processings such as editing. The automatic inhibited character processing is not conducted at this stage but executed on the entire sentences before they are supplied to a printer for printout.
However the conventional apparatus is capable of overall inhibited character processing but is incapable of applying such processing only to a part of the obtained sentences, thus being disadvantageous in providing such processing even in locations not desired by the user.
Furthermore, the known apparatus for printing uniform rows of characters in a given area, such as exemplified by the word processing apparatus disclosed in the aforementioned Japanese Patent Application 127203/1979, is unable to position a single letter in a given area. Consequently such apparatus is disadvantageous in being incapable of uniform spacing if only one character is entered in said area in the input stage.
In the present invention, in case only one character is entered in a given area, uniform spacing is achieved by printing said character in the center of said area.
In Japanese sentences, the inhibited character processing inevitably results in an increase or decrease of the number of characters in a row, giving rise to an unaesthetic printing because of the fluctuation in the number of characters from row to row. For this reason the pitch of characters is suitably adjusted for each row in such a manner that every row can be accommodated within a determined length.
In the conventional letterpress printing, such adjustment is achieved by manual control of the character pitch. Also in case of a dot matrix printer, the adjustment of character pitch has no standard procedure and has to be done with significant toil by the operator.
Furthermore, in the already known word processing apparatus capable of automatically handling the characters of which use is inhibited for the head or end of a row, wherein the sentences for example entered from a keyboard are displayed on a cathode ray tube for various processings such as editing, the inhibited character processing does not take place at this stage but is automatically applied when an instruction for printout is given, and the result of such processing can only be confirmed on the printing paper. For this reason it is not possible to modify such processing automatically conducted. On the other hand it is also true that such modification or correction afterwards is indispensable because of the limitation in the automatic inhibited character processing.